THOUGH JUST A DAY PAST ITS SELL-BY, IT DOES SMELL A BIT IFFY.

COOKIE DOUGH ICE CREAM

Cookie dough ice cream is perfectly edible, but it is fundamentally misguided on two levels, the gustatory and the conceptual. Let us consider each of these in turn.

Firstly, the lumps of cookie dough, as they manifest themselves in the Ben and Jerry’s incarnation of the aforementioned ice cream, have the texture of sand. I am reminded with every mouthful of those grains of sand I used inadvertently to get in my mouth on the beach as a child. (I have just spent about 9 minutes trying to think of a way to elaborate upon this in a manner that might improve the odds, which currently stand at about 1,000,000,000,000,000 to 1, of this blog post’s going viral, but frankly I think the raw fact of the matter is more pertinent than any fine words that might be brought to bear upon it: the lumps of cookie dough in cookie dough ice cream taste like sand. Sand, I tell you!)

Thus, we have dealt with the gustatory level. What, then, of the conceptual level? What about cookie dough ice cream as a concept? I think the very notion of ‘cookie dough ice cream’ is hugely problematic. And with what is currently going on in Gaza and Ukraine I do not make that statement lightly. The problem, as I see it, is this: dough is, by definition, uncooked, which begs the question as to why an uncooked variant of something that everyone agrees tastes good cooked – i.e. cookies (the clue’s in the name for chrissakes) – should be preferred as an ice cream ingredient. We don’t go around making sandwiches out of dough instead of bread, do we? Kant said that humans ought never to be used merely as a means to an end. The same cannot be said of dough, which ought only ever to be used as a means to an end, be it bread, cookies, or whatever.

So I have somewhat remarkably managed to shoehorn Gaza, Ukraine and Kant into an essay on ice cream. Before I give myself the month off that I believe this ingenuity entitles me to, I wish to anticipate and deal with the following objection:

“Ah! But the bods behind cookie dough ice cream are highly ingenious people! They are thinking outside the box! They are engaged in blue sky thinking! Sure, dough may uncooked, but if it tastes good, then who cares, man? Why should these creative genii be hemmed in by your sophomoric concern for semantics and your culinary parochialism?”

To which I bring my argument full circle and refer my interlocutor back to my initial point: it doesn’t taste good, it tastes like sand! And even if it doesn’t taste exactly like sand – I did say after all that cookie dough ice cream is ‘perfectly edible’ – I venture to suggest that an ice cream containing actual pieces of cookie, as opposed merely to the dough thereof, would be vastly superior. So I end with a suggestion for future research: stick some pieces of cookie in an ice cream.